


A Thing About Death

by ZoeBug



Series: A Length of Twine (Prompt Jar Drabbles) [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Analysis, Character Study, Drabble, F/M, Introspection, Light Angst, Mortality, No Spoilers, Prompt Fic, Relationship Study, Team Feels, Written Post-The Raven Boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 20:28:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7588894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompted Drabble: <em>thanatophobia</em> (n.) an intense and irrational fear of death; the feeling of dread, apprehension, or solicitude when one thinks of the process of dying, or ceasing to ‘be’</p><p>-</p><p>"The boy has quite a thing about death."  The words stick in Blue’s mind after the call. </p><p>But she supposes it’s another thing she has in common with Gansey: having realized as children how closely death comes trotting at one’s heels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thing About Death

**Author's Note:**

> Posting as a separate piece cus I realized I really didn't like having one post for all my multi-fandom drabbles. They're easier to find this way and don't bug me to look at ;;u;; *yells from the other side of the grocery store* I'm always a slut for formatting!
> 
> So I originally wrote this RIGHT after I finished reading The Raven Boys so there are not spoilers for the other three books.
> 
> Enjoy! Introspective pieces about character relationships are my jam,

_thanatophobia_

(n.) an intense and irrational fear of death; the feeling of dread, apprehension, or solicitude when one thinks of the process of dying, or ceasing to ‘be’

* * *

 

“ _The boy has quite a thing about death_.”

The words stick in Blue’s mind after the call. Like flotsam tossed about by an ocean storm, they bob back above the surface after an unpredictable stretch submerged.

But she supposes it’s another thing she has in common with Gansey: having realized as children how closely death comes trotting at one’s heels.

Blue’s breakfast table conversations have been littered with “die” and “killed” as if they were news of an upcoming bake sale or a store opening.

It’s been… well, not _normal_ , but normalized. Frequent. Almost desensitizing.

She’s been told her whole life that she is walking, one foot in front of the other, toward the death of someone she loves. Regarding it with varying degrees of dissociation and attitudes didn’t make it any less of an ever present factor. It has just always been… _there_ , in the way that strangely gnarled large tree on one’s walk to the neighborhood corner store or the way that birthmark on the back of one’s leg has always been there. Present, but… distant and nearly unnoticed.

The prophecy―and the tragic death it foretold―has always been something of a passive addition to the backdrop of Blue’s life.

But Gansey?

Maybe this isn’t something they really understand about each other after all. Blue’s experience with the omnipresence of death is something almost detached; it’s something that happens to _other_ people. Her mother’s clients, spirits of townsfolk whose names she scratches down like a reaper readying their list each year on St. Mark’s Day, even her prophecized beloved someday. But always _other people_.

But it’s different for Gansey, she realizes.

The Death―capital D―that hovers about Gansey isn’t a paintbrush stroke in the backdrop or a detached concept.

Death is something that stretches long and looming like a shadow on the ground before Gansey, as if he walks his life with the sun ever at his back. It is dark and frightening, a warped echo of his own shape that obscures path before him; something that forces him feel about for his future in darkness.

Gansey, even yet unknowing of his fate―his _possible_ fate, Blue has to keep reminding herself firmly―that Blue had seen that day upon the corpse road, is well acquainted with the harsh reality of death breathing down his neck, of having its icy fingers gripping around his throat.

He’d told Blue, the day they’d found Noah’s body, that he’d almost died once―had been _convinced_ he would die there that day―and yet, Gansey is not afraid.

Gansey is out living his life and flashing his money about and chasing down his long lost Welsh king not because he is naive or foolish or doesn’t understand the reality and danger of doing so.

Gansey _does_ understand. And he lives anyway.

Gansey―who is annoyingly rich, who is rude and condescending until he isn’t, whose words can sometimes be his own undoing and other times be his salvation, who had left his EpiPen in his Camaro when they'd tramped across an open field, who Blue suspects fights a perpetual struggle to reconcile pieces of himself with others, who has a _literal_ ghost for a roommate, who had glanced at his journal like he had wanted her to understand it said more about him than any blazer or wristwatch―lives _anyway_.

And it hadn’t been until that day in the forest with Adam in the center of the pentagram and Whelk’s crumpled body on the forest floor and Blue’s sudden realization that nothing really bad had ever happened to her in her life, that Blue had understood how extraordinarily _brave_ Gansey is.

And it strikes Blue that she doesn't know if it’s possible for her to ever be brave in the way Gansey is. But perhaps, she considers, that's not the point. Perhaps Gansey’s type of bravery isn’t the kind that would serve her best in the long run, considering the cards the fates had drawn for her.

Because the threat of death that hangs about the heels of Gansey’s shoes and stirs with the turning of every page of his books is that of his own. And the nature of the death that fills out the background of Blue’s life is, after all, the deaths of those around her.

Perhaps, Blue thinks, Gansey is brave in a way she never will be and, in the end, will never need to be. Perhaps they are all brave in different ways that they need to be, to face the kinds of demons that have been let loose on their trails with their scent and theirs alone filling the hunting dogs’ noses.

Blue does not need to conquer her fear of dying because it has not been written in the stars for her to die. And Gansey does not need to overcome any terror he might have of causing the deaths of those he loves because it has not been foretold for him to do so.

Blue is allowed to be scared in the way Gansey has to be brave and vice versa. Complimentary fear and complimentary courage.

Energy and energy.

Matchy matchy.

Maybe, Blue thinks, there is a kind of energy that works like the ley lines that lies between the hearts of people who are linked in such ways. She wonders if you looked at someone from above with the ability to see such things, people would look like spider webs, if you could see lines of energy spreading outwards toward the others that matched them in one way or another.

Perhaps, like Noah, those lines are places where death can change the things between the endpoints but nothing is erased. They go on.

Even when the endpoints become ruins of once towering and monumental structures, when she and Adam and Gansey and Ronan join Noah in the graveyard of the church and become nothing but bones and memory and then fade beyond even that, the lines will still remain.

Like the line that runs through Henrietta had when Blue had first met her raven boys, perhaps the ones that connect her to them will simply sleep; they will sink below the ground and into the earth and only cause any passing dowsing rods to twitch the smallest bit. The echoes of the things that bind them all together with catch at the toes of people's shoes as they walk by, unaware―a stumbling hiccup in someone's life as they pass over the people she and her friends once were to each other.

Even if Blue can’t _see_ them, maybe if she finds them, if she _believes_ in the power of them―the lines that run between the hearts of people who will always be tied together―it will be a way for her to be brave when the crash of thunder echoes in the distance and warns of the storm creeping over the horizon.

Maybe it will give her the strength to do the Blue version of exploring an open field for signs of a ley line with an EMF meter in one’s hand and EpiPen back in the glove-box of one’s Camaro. Whatever that turns out to be.

Maybe, if she follows along their path, they will lead her to her bravery.

Maybe they already have.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos always appreciated!  
>   
> [fanfic/podfic blog](http://zoe-bug.tumblr.com/) | [personal](http://xiexiecaptain.tumblr.com/) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/xiexiecaptain)


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